Binding: Paperback
Description: Fires of Gold is a powerful ethnography of the often shrouded cultural legal political and spiritual forces governing the gold mining industry in Ghana one of Africa's most celebrated democracies. Lauren Coyle Rosen argues that significant sources of power have arisen outside of the formal legal system to police adjudicate and navigate conflict in this theater of violence destruction and rebirth. These authorities or shadow sovereigns include the transnational mining company collectivized artisanal miners civil society advocacy groups and significant religious figures and spiritual forces from African Islamic and Christian traditions. Often more salient than official bodies of government the shadow sovereigns reveal a reconstitution of sovereign power one that in many ways is generated by hidden dimensions of the legal system. Coyle Rosen also contends that spiritual forces are central in anchoring and animating shadow sovereigns as well as key forms of legal authority economic value and political contestation. This innovative book illuminates how the crucible of gold itself governed by spirits serves as a critical site for embodied struggles over the realignment of the classical philosophical triad: the city the soul and the sacred.
Title: Fires Of Gold Law Spirit And Sacrificial Labor In Ghana
Author(s): Coyle Rosen Lauren
Publisher: University Of California Press
Barcode: 9780520343337
Pages: 224 Pages, 3 B-W Maps
Publication Date: 4/21/2020
Series: Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century
Category: Social & Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography